


Venus, planet of love

by theankletattoo



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, I Blame Tumblr, Implied/Referenced Sex, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Self-Indulgent, Sorry if I make you cry, Title from a Mitski Song, and words. words are pretty and i can't shut up. apologies from me, idk if there's anything else i need to tag?, reference to past relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 10:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28669575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theankletattoo/pseuds/theankletattoo
Summary: The moon is too high up in the sky, the blooms are forgotten, they are expanses of barren land, stripped off and nude, sharing secrets like ripe nectarines, afraid of heavy hands and bruising fingers, holding them in a hollow beside their hearts, building an orchard of love.Of things they can share. Of things they trust each other. To keep it close, keep it safe.
Relationships: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson
Comments: 15
Kudos: 55





	Venus, planet of love

**Author's Note:**

> un-beta'd. all mistakes are my own. very very self indulgent. title from nobody by mitski

“There is a door in every one of us,” Louis says, his chin tilted up, the chiseled planes of his face softened by the waxy light pouring through the lace curtains.

A flower dances over his cheek and half his mouth. Harry’s eyes stay on his mouth, watching the words form themselves, a flash of pink tongue, glint of white teeth.

Louis’ looking at him and his reaction, not taking him apart, not yet, just watching with those round, ocean eyes of his.

“A door,” he repeats, slow, both a question and an agreement.

The wind picks up, the curtains move with more vigour, the delicate lace flowers now spanning over his nose and throat, shadows dotting him like stars in the midnight sky.

There are stars and flowers all over him and Harry’s mouth is a bit dry. His limbs bent like shy lilies.

“Yeah, a door. We all have doors leading to our stories. A scar on your thigh, a stick and poke tattoo, the way you cook your eggs, the way I fold the sheets. They’re all these tiny stories, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”

There is no mouth lovelier than Louis’ when it wraps around words like _jigsaw_ and _your_ and _tattoo_. He can’t tear his eyes away and he doesn’t try to.

Louis dips his head to the side. It’s nothing, just a simple action but watching him like _this,_ open and languid, it feels like he is holding a secret in his closed fist and unblinking eyes.

“Are your doors open?” The question tumbles out, the careful threads holding him back snapping like twigs.

Louis’ eyes skitter away and there is a rotten feeling burning in his ribs, foul breath hitting his cheek. A sudden reminder that he is not entitled to any of it and maybe, _maybe,_ he’s pushed too far, stuck his hand deeper, trying to scoop out everything and now his hand is stuck.

“A few of them. The others — I don’t want them to open. Not for a long time,” he finally confesses, voice possessing an odd lilt, like the words coming out of him are not his but also his and he is trying to own them.

The wind slows down, the bloom stays constant over his mouth, petals curling into him.

His cheek looks soft as a petal. Harry wants to stroke it, he refrains.

The wait makes everything much more sweeter. Patience bears the sweetest fruits.

“Tell me about a closed door,” he requests instead, tucking his palms under his thighs, the denim warm, the floor cold.

A contrast, just like the emotions flickering on his face.

On one hand Louis wants to tell him everything, bare himself under his scrutiny and let him stitch him back while on the other he wants to hold tight to his scars, the train tracks marring his skin, door jambs stuck and unstuck, lines scratched against the wall that is him in this body, him under tissue and muscle.

“Let me take you back to my two years in private school, yeah?” The corners of his lips twitch, going through a memory locked in him.

Harry leans forward to rest his forehead on his shoulder. “Yeah.”

“I was sixteen and that was my second year there. Was along with the smartest kids around and well, I wasn’t the smartest. Struggled to get along with the shit that went down in the classes and for a limited time I did.”

He is lost in his thoughts, absent-mindedly tugging on the rose pink silk sleeve. “We had a week off out of the blue and I was ecstatic to go home, to spend a little time doing absolutely nothing but laze around.”

A bitter chuckle spills past his lips. “Turns out it wasn’t really a break. There were students still studying and staying back, getting extra help.”

Harry squeezes his thigh. “That was shitty of them to do. A shitty thing really.”

“That’s how it works in the higher circles, y’know. Your mouth is stuffed with money to keep in all the scandals.”

“Does one of them lead to this period?” Them meaning the doors. Curiosity spreads in his chest.

Louis’ hum is lost in his curls. “It does. I don’t like to think about it, it played a role to make me what I am but it also made me question the way I wear this skin, the way I carry this body, this weight.”

“You were so young, sweetheart. You shouldn’t have had to.” _I’m sorry,_ he wants to say. Not for the lesson, not for what he’s learnt but for the pain, the wound, the scar on his tender boy.

“Pain does not know age, Harry. It comes forth at infliction.” A sad edge takes over his words, sharpens it enough to slice through the surface, allow a few droplets of crimson fo drip down, stain the carpet, the boots he pulls on with two hands, the rings that he slides on every morning.

He sits up and presses his cold lips against the side of his face, right above his cheekbones, the feverish skin hidden by soft hair, pulse barely contained.

“Here,” Louis murmurs, fingers pushing his jaw, higher and higher until his lips are resting on his temple.

It is vulnerable. It is intimate.

“We’re all gods, and these,” he lifts his palm and pushes him slightly, covering the spot he’s just kissed. “These pairs, these bones are our temples. Our places of worship.”

The flowers morph into flames and the moonlight washes it white.

“Tell me about an open door,” he strangely echoes, needing more lest he cry, bathed in the glow of words.

Louis smiles, full and complete. “All the doors hold pain, H.”

“Even the open ones?”

“Especially the open ones,” he tells and if Harry were to kiss him right now, snake his tongue in and lick into his mouth, he would taste sadness in the corners.

A moonlit conversation was all it was supposed to be and it has become something deeper and darker, both of them naked with their clothes on.

Harry lays his head on his thigh, fingers scratch his scalp, he sighs in contentment.

“The one I revisit the most is our first time. When you bought candles and I spread petals on our bed and woke up with rose stained sheets.” 

He remembers it vividly. The sheets held their fragrance and everytime he took a whiff of the sweet smell, he was reminded of what had transpired between them. Sunshine laughter, petal pink chests, bodies fitting in harmony, whimpers high and moans low, keening in pleasure, all molten heat and velvet lips.

“The memory, the constant fingering, the length of you, a piece of you in me, us joined together. I peer into the opened door and inside is our room and our bodies tied, and I can never tell where I began and where you ended. It fills me with an ache and I am reminded,” Louis pauses, licks his lips and swallows.

There, hiding in his throat are letters in an unfamiliar language all spelling out Louis’ name.

“I am reminded that love is overwhelming and for someone like me, pain has been the only emotion that I felt in such large magnitude.”

“ _This must be what love is: a pain so radiant it cuts through all others,_ ” Harry quotes, mouth curved into a crescent.

It resonates within him.

“It pains me too.”

The moon is too high up in the sky, the blooms are forgotten, they are expanses of barren land, stripped off and nude, sharing secrets like ripe nectarines, afraid of heavy hands and bruising fingers, holding them in a hollow beside their hearts, building an orchard of love.

Of things they can share. Of things they trust each other. To keep it close, keep it safe.

He thinks it is not a question but a plea. Louis is disguising his begging with a question, as though the higher tone at the end will mask the helplessness that is seeping into his pores. His tenses muscles give it away.

“What does, Harry?”

It echoes. If he had hollow bones like birds, you would find Louis’ voice in them, break him open and he is full of Louis.

Louis Louis Louis.

“To know our love hurts you,” he mumbles, each letter a dagger to his heart.

The wind stills and the silence rings loud.

Louis breaks it. “My first year in uni I took a wrong turn and ended up in another building. There was a girl and she told me I had good skin. She must’ve meant my face but to this day I still think about her.”

“She’d been struck by your ethereality to properly find words, baby,” Harry teases, nestled into his side, words spoken into his neck.

“Our love hurts but it is not to cause me grief. It’s a reminder that I made it through. The fucked up childhood, the unstable household, the empty words and weighted silences all hanging around my neck like a perpetual noose — they can’t touch me anymore.”

A constellation of adoration maps the length of his spine, devotion gleams in his eyes. He wants to create something to show the world that his boy, his man, his _lover_ is Venus. Goddess of sex, beauty, desire, fertility and love.

Clouds of desire, bubbles of beauty, shimmers of sex, planet of love.

“I once wrote a song for you. I write too many songs about you but nothing ever captures all that you are to me, Lou. Everyday I am blessed to have you with me. I love you.”

Louis sniffles, holding back a sob, afraid to show him the ruins of his past selves, the shattered glass of mirrors that bore his reflection for years and years.

“I love you,” he repeats. A frantic prayer, a steady reminder, an unbreakable promise.

Crying, he reaches out to tangle his fingers with Harry’s, the flowers wilting and crumpled, the moon sinking again, a sliver of orange zipping across the dark blue sky, indicating the hours they’ve spent sitting under the window, cleaning old wounds.

A visceral desperation takes root in him, his body. There are layers in him, primal sex and primal shame. They both overlap and from the center is birthed his love.

And he is tired of covering it.

“I want all of you. Let me have you.”

Louis shakes his head, “I’m trying. I want to and I will. Just not today.”

Patience and kindness both reap love. Harry is ready to give him the world and everything beyond.

For a while he just cries, sobs reducing to hiccups, violent tremors calming down, his hands still shaking but no longer cold.

Their shoulders are lighter than they have been in a long while. The sky is dappled with rays of sunlight.

Louis burrows under the warm blankets and presses his smile into the cold sheets.

He curls up against him, presses his forehead to his ribs, seeks out the thrum of his blood, the beat of his heart, the repetitive expansion and contraction of his lungs, belly rising, falling, crumbling and rebuilding.

Ruins are not ruins as much as they are fragments of memories that remain.

Louis lays his hand over his sternum, lower than where his heart lies, above his navel. Harry covers it with his own.

Metal against skin, cold and warm, smooth and fine.

“Center of you lies a poem and I yearn to learn all the words,” he whispers into his shirt, muffled by the soft fabric.

His laugh expands inside Harry’s self. “Go to sleep, you poetic sap.”

Right as he is giving into sleep’s warm caresses, he realises, there is no door obstructing and where he lays his hand, it is indeed the center of love.

Words are what hold them together, his aching soul, his fevered mind. They tie him and his lover together.

There is a door in Harry and beyond it lies his whole world — _Louis_.

**Author's Note:**

> [tweet](https://twitter.com/theankletattoo/status/1348276475481501708?s=19) [fic post](https://hadestyles.tumblr.com/post/639934593941782528/venus-planet-of-love-by-theankletattoo)


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